(2016 Nov 23 18:53)Osweo Wrote: And hell, even if it doesn't get quite as far as establishing the Imperium of Man, it will all have been worth it for the lulz, feels, and sheer emotional rollercoaster ride of it all thus far...

I voted for DJT so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt. The fact that he even bothered to call the family of the slain police officer shows that he's nothing like Obama who, as the article points out at the end, has sent regime officials to the funerals of some of the slain thugs.

hannityOn Monday, Sean Hannity took things up a notch with his recommendation that Donald Trump should lock the media out of the White House.

As the Fox pundit celebrates Trump’s victory, he has suggested multiple times that the President-elect should blacklist a wide variety of news outlets over their “collusion” with Hillary Clinton. During a conversation yesterday with Matt Boyle on Breitbart News Daily, Hannity opined that the election has exposed the great majority of the press as corrupt or clearly biased.

“It is the most underreported story out there. They’re not going to cover the fact that they themselves colluded with Clinton, helped Clinton, in some cases, gave questions to her or sought questions for Trump or for Cruz through the DNC…,” Hannity said. “They’re all in this hyperventilating mode about ‘fake news’ now, but they are fake news. That’s them. It’s now on display for the world to see.”

Hannity also expressed his view that the media’s credibility has been crippled by their own surprise over Trump’s victory. He also opined that, beyond taking credentials away from members of the White House press corps, Trump might as well consider doing away with the entire office:

“People don’t need them any more. They’re done. I suggested the other day that if any of these organizations were involved in collusion with the Clinton campaign, why do they get a seat in the White House press office? Why does Donald Trump need a White House press office? He doesn’t. You know, you can have a pool person that’s standing by if, God forbid, there’s any bad news about the president that the country needs to know, but his own staff could tweet it out, for crying out loud.”

Mnuchin will be Treasury Secretary Ross will lead the Commerce Department.
President-elect Donald Trump has filled more top posts on his economic team — picking former Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary and financier Wilbur Ross to lead the Commerce Department.

Mnuchin is confirming that he and Ross are joining Trump’s Cabinet, pending confirmation by the Senate.

He tells CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in an interview Wednesday that “we’re thrilled to work for the president-elect and honored to have these positions.”

Mnuchin says “sustained economic growth” is the chief priority of the incoming administration and he says “we can absolutely get to sustained 3 to 4 percent” in the gross domestic product. (...)

As President-elect’s Donald Trump’s transition rolls on, more and more attention is being paid to possible selections for a variety of high-ranking positions and meetings that might help decide these appointments.

On Monday, Trump will meet with John Allison, the former CEO of the bank BB&T and of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.

There have been reports that Allison is being considered for Treasury secretary.

Trump’s has on the campaign trail questioned the future of the Federal Reserve’s political independence, but Allison takes that rhetoric a step further. While running the the Cato Institute, Allison wrote a paper in support of abolishing the Fed.

“I would get rid of the Federal Reserve because the volatility in the economy is primarily caused by the Fed,” Allison wrote in 2014 for the Cato Journal, a publication of the institute.

Allison said that simply allowing the market to regulate itself would be preferable to the Fed harming the stability of the financial system.

“When the Fed is radically changing the money supply, distorting interest rates, and over-regulating the financial sector, it makes rational economic calculation difficult,” Allison wrote. “Markets do form bubbles, but the Fed makes them worse.”

Allison also suggested that the government’s practice of insuring bank deposits up to $250,000 should be abolished and the US should go back to a banking system backed by “a market standard such as gold.”

Allison also argued for higher capital reserves of up to 20% of assets at banks. On the other hand, he also argued that the government should repeal three of the broadest banking regulations.

“We should raise capital standards, but it is even more important to eliminate burdensome regulations — including Dodd-Frank, the Community Reinvestment Act, and Truth in Lending,” Allison wrote. “About 25 percent of a bank’s personnel cost relates to regulations. Banks cannot pay the regulatory costs and have high capital standards.”

This is similar to Trump’s desire to roll back regulation — including Dodd-Frank — on financial institutions, though he has since backtracked somewhat.

It is unclear if any of Allison’s policy views will ultimately become a part of Trump’s plan, but given the unconventional nature of his ideas, the meeting is notable.

Media Bias: Not surprisingly, the media take seriously and support Jill Stein's and Hillary Clinton's excellent vote-recount adventure, despite there being no indication a recount is needed. Heck, even President Obama agrees — Donald Trump won, period. But when Trump dares to suggest in a Sunday tweet that illegal aliens voted in the election, the media respond with massive denial.

"In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally," Trump tweeted to the barely concealed contempt of many in the media.

Typical was the utterly dismissive headline in The Nation, the flagship publication of the progressive movement: "The President-Elect Is An Internet Troll."

The Washington Post's "The Fix" blog site did a little better: "Donald Trump's new explanation for losing the popular vote? A Twitter-born conspiracy theory."

There are many more, too many to put here. Most follow the same theme: Trump foolishly followed the faulty analysis of Gregg Phillips of True The Vote, an online anti-voter-fraud site and app. Phillips estimates that illegals cast three million votes in the 2016 election. He's wrong, say the media. Heck, even the liberal fact-checking site FactCheck.org says so.
But, in fact, it's almost certain that illegals did vote — and in significant numbers. Whether it was three million or not is another question.

While states control the voter registration process, some states are so notoriously slipshod in their controls (California, Virginia and New York — all of which have political movements to legalize voting by noncitizens — come to mind) that it would be shocking if many illegals didn't vote. Remember, a low-ball estimate says there are at least 11 million to 12 million illegals in the U.S., but that's based on faulty Census data. More likely estimates put the number at 20 million to 30 million.

What's disappointing is that instead of at least seriously considering Trump's charge, many media reports merely parrot leftist talking points and anti-Trump rhetoric by pushing the idea that Republicans and others not of the progressive left who seek to limit voting to citizens only are racist, xenophobic nuts.

But there is evidence to back Trump's claims. A 2014 study in the online Electoral Studies Journal shows that in the 2008 and 2010 elections, illegal immigrant votes were in fact quite high.

"We find that some noncitizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and congressional elections," wrote Jesse T. Richman, Gulshan A. Chattha, both of Old Dominion University, and David C. Earnest of George Mason University.

More specifically, they write, "Noncitizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress."

Specifically, the authors say that illegals may have cast as many as 2.8 million votes in 2008 and 2010. That's a lot of votes. And when you consider the population of illegal inhabitants has only grown since then, it's not unreasonable to suppose that their vote has, too.

Critics note that a Harvard team in 2015 had responded to the study, calling it "biased." But that report included this gem: "Further, the likely percent of noncitizen voters in recent U.S. elections is 0."

Really? That's simply preposterous, frankly, as anyone who has lived in California can attest. Leftist get-out-the-vote groups openly urge noncitizens to vote during election time, and the registration process is notoriously loose. To suggest there is no illegal voting at all is absurd.
What's appalling, as we said, is not the media's skepticism, but its denial. But why? Illegal votes shouldn't be allowed to sway U.S. elections. So why tolerate them?

When the far left began insinuating that the Russians had hacked the election, the media treated the nonsupported claims with the utmost of respect. They still do. But not Trump's suggestion that illegals voted, and in large numbers, mainly for Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton.

And, yes, Trump is right: Illegal votes may in part explain why Hillary now has a nearly two-million-vote lead in the popular vote, even though she lost convincingly in the Electoral College. A Pew Research Poll earlier this year found that 53% of the Democratic Party supports letting illegals vote, even though it's against the law. It's pretty clear why.

Yes, there is room for skepticism of any claim that's made. But every vote cast by someone who isn't by law permitted to vote disenfranchises American citizens. The charge should at least be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, we will expect the media to continue to give its fawning attention to the spurious challenges of nonexistent vote tampering leveled by Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein, on behalf of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

While the media savage Trump and his motives, please recall what Hillary said in the debates: that the idea a defeated candidate wouldn't recognize the results of the election was "horrifying." And she has also agreed there is no "actionable evidence" of either hacking or outside interference, despite joining with Stein to seek recounts.

So what about Clinton's motives?

As for Stein, who barely registered a blip on the 2016 electoral screen, the $5 million or so she has raised to pay for recounts really seems more like a ploy to bail out her failed campaign than a serious attempt at a recount. But the media continue to treat her like a serious political operator — not the far-left kook she is.

The anti-Russian angle on the hacking/Wikileaks/Russian influence on the 2016 election is making a mountain out of a molehill, simply because Putin’s influence was wide open and public. He didn’t hide that he favored Trump. He made it plain that Clinton was a dangerous choice.

Russia has a big interest in who becomes the U.S. president and so do many other states, because the U.S. is the big world superpower and the president is extremely powerful. It is only natural that countries that are affected by a large empire in their midst have a stake in who runs it, and they will naturally exert what influence they can on the outcome. The Israelis and the Saudis have their lobbies, their campaign contributions and their favorites, for example. No one really should get exercised over Russia putting in its two bits. This is the name of the game, under current political conditions. There are continual lobbying pressures upon Congress. There is no strong reason to ignore that and make a big deal out of pressures or revelations during an election. Elections and Congressional votes are part of the same process of big government power and favoritism.

According to this recent Wapo article, there is not evidence that the Kremlin directed a hacking operation, obtaining e-mails that went to Wikileaks, thereby helping Trump and hurting Clinton in the election. To quote the article:

“…intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin ‘directing’ the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were ‘one step’ removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.”

The CIA says it has identified hackers or sources as individuals connected to the Russian government but not in it. The U.S. officials who heard out the CIA on this matter concluded “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected.” This is an extremely weak statement in the sense of being critical. After all, during the campaign, Putin openly said that a Clinton victory meant confrontation with Russia. In late October of 2016, Putin raised WW 3 fears related to a Clinton win. One headline read “‘Very aggressive’ Vladimir Putin announces US Clinton WW3 fears in chilling video”. We didn’t need the CIA to tell us that Russia had a favorite, not when this was part of a public record available to anyone. That’s why we can say that the CIA is really saying nothing new here. The hullabaloo about hacking/Wikileaks/Russia is strictly to score political points and to weaken Trump’s power to maneuver.

There is no doubt that Putin favored Trump over Clinton during the campaign. This was known at least as early as this article in December, 2015. There are a number of obvious reasons why Putin favored Trump. Trump by that date had a multi-year history of favorable comments about Putin. Hillary Clinton had an equally long history of antagonism toward Putin. Clinton promised confrontation with Russia. The defense of Russia and the Russian state alone would have made Putin favor Trump.

Did the Kremlin direct leaks to Wikileaks? The case is unproven. Assange denies it. But it makes no difference to much of anything if it were to be shown that it did do so. It would simply affirm a form of blowback. When the U.S. empire takes a big interest in some foreign country, we can expect that country to take a big interest in who is running the empire. U.S. elections cannot be purified and made independent of foreign influences of many kinds. Dirty election tricks, schemes and information leaks are not limited to U.S. political operatives within a given party or between parties.